Life As We Know It?

A frequent response to the evidence against the origin of life by Darwinian evolution is, “All the difficulties with the evolution of life only apply to life as we know it. But what about other kinds of life?” Greg responds.

Darwinists run into a significant problem, it seems to me, when dealing with the origin of life because this is an incredibly complex thing, and nobody has any real idea about how this could come about without intelligent intervention. You’ve got to have the kick-off before you can have the game, and before Darwinism proper can move forward, you have to have a beginning of life.

It has been really difficult to even begin to address that problem because the more that we find out about life, the more complex we learn it is—it just complicates the problem. So what some people have done is they have invoked phrases like, “life as we know it might be difficult to form. Maybe there is ‘life as we DON’T know it’ that is in outer space somewhere that represents the precursors of life on earth.”

This is a curious response: ‘Oh, well, this is life as we know it. What about life as we don’t know it?’ My response is, “Well, we don’t know about that do we?” This is kind of a phantom argument. It’s like invoking facts or realities that we have no reason to believe exist to play a role to defeat facts that we DO know exist. This is worse than ‘god of the gaps.’ It’s not even ‘science of the gaps.’ It’s a kind of, ‘science-fiction of the gaps,’ and invoking some, ‘life as we don’t know it,’ to rescue us from the problems we have now. It’s just not a sound way of getting around the very significant problems of the origin of life on this planet.